OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 is the open-source app on which Sun's StarOffice, another outstanding alternative to Microsoft Office, is based. StarOffice costs $79.95 for a single-user license; OpenOffice is a 64MB download that installs a freeware powerhouse that can easily take the place of Microsoft Office on most desktops. Its full-featured word processor, spreadsheet, and image and presentation editors match all the widely used features in Office; they open and save Office documents almost as smoothly as Office itself and add PDF generation from all applications. Open-Office is also the only suite that is completely, unequivocally free, whether you use it for business or pleasure.

Don't be fooled by the low version number. This open-source suite has been evolving for a decade, partly through the work of volunteers and partly with support from Sun Microsystems. Versions of OpenOffice run on every major platform, so it's an ideal choice if you need seamless file transfers among Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Macintosh systems. Some of the elements require Java. A more powerful Version 2.0 is in late public beta, due for final release in 2005.

The suite's interface has a sparse, gray, gloomy style—at least it's not distracting—but beneath the surface is a well-oiled machine. The word processor, Writer, handled our intricate Microsoft Word documents as smoothly as if it had created them. The Calc spreadsheet was unfazed by our complex Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, although it did not display the data in the imported charts—it showed only the axes and background. Impress, the presentation editor, opened Microsoft Office presentations, complete with fancy slide transitions. The word processor and spreadsheet let ordinary users record macros, and the entire suite supports a powerful programming language similar to Office's Visual Basic for Applications.

Writer duplicates most of the functions of Word and adds a built-in bibliographical database designed for scientists and academics. Only two views are available: Page and Online (akin to Word's Normal view). The Find menu supports regular expressions (including nontext items like paragraph and line breaks, formatting items like bold and underline, and fonts) for elaborate wild-card searches, and the help file explains this advanced feature clearly enough for beginners to use it. A well-organized Format | Page dialog gives quick access to features like headers and footers, which are scattered among multiple menus in Word. But if you want to change margins in the middle of the page, you'll have to look in a different menu for the Section dialog. Strangely, the Undo feature won't reverse a page-margin change; you have to remember the earlier setting and restore it by hand.

You can create Web pages in Writer, but if you want to be able to modify the raw HTML code rather than work in a strictly WYSIWYG view, you have to start up the word processor in a special Web-editing mode. You can build HTML forms with the help of wizards, but you need to use a separate Form Navigator to modify them after creation. Writer's tables don't support tables within cells.

The Calc spreadsheet supports over 200 functions and has most of the raw power of Excel, with slightly fewer conveniences. Calc matches most of Excel's advanced features such as conditional formatting, filtering, and pivot tables (Calc calls this feature DataPilot), and it officially supports array functions, although some array functions in the current version produce errors or obviously mistaken results. Calc doesn't offer the same range of preset cell formats (such as number formatting) as Excel, although you can hand-build any format you like, just as you can in Excel. Spreadsheets are limited to 32,000 rows, about half the maximum in Excel, but that's large enough for most purposes; Version 2.0 will match Excel's maximum.

A "floating-frame" menu item makes it effortless to display cells from another spreadsheet inside the current one. Calc's charts don't match the graphic razzle- dazzle of Excel but are more than adequate for financial and scientific purposes. The convenient Style palette displays all the formatting styles in the current sheet for one-click application to a selected cell or range.

The presentation application, Impress, bears little resemblance to its Microsoft counterpart, PowerPoint, and file exchange between the two isn't quite perfect. Most transitions and animations created in PowerPoint displayed smoothly in an Impress slide show, but some of the animations that played couldn't be accessed and modified from within Impress. And when we ran an Impress presentation in PowerPoint, it simply ignored some animations applied in Impress.

OpenOffice.org uses XML as its native file format, although it's a different flavor of XML from Office's, and OpenOffice can't open Office-format XML files. OpenOffice can be set to save files by default in Microsoft Office DOC and XLS formats. Corporate users who need a version that comes with technical support can license Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 7.0, which includes everything that's in OpenOffice and adds an integrated database, commercial-quality import/export filters, additional fonts, and an integrated desktop feature that most Windows users won't want.